Tag Archives: The Wash

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the vast flocks of geesewhich overwinter on The Wash; and there were also big numbers of other birds including small groups of dunlin close in by the shore:

Dunlin (Calidris alpina, Dansk: almindelig ryle)

But a little further out, and almost invisible until they took to the air, were enormous flocks of thousands of dunlin. I couldn’t see what flushed them, but every few minutes they rose en masse and put on a stunning display of aerobatic prowess:

Thousands of dunlin moving in very close proximity at high speed and never colliding

Occasionally they turned into the sun creating a shimmering ribbon of grey and white across the sky:

And as with the geese in the previous post the other thing which I hadn’t thought about until they were swirling overhead was the noise. It was a very different sound to the geese which gave a slow muted beating sound, the dunlin sounded more like a fast moving cloud of enormous insects. It was a really exciting spectacle. And as well as the dunlin flocks of oystercatcher wheeled over from behind and landed in a line on the mud flats:

When I was a kid in the 70’s vast flocks of lapwing were a relatively frequent phenomenon in the fields out in the countryside around home, but their numbers have plummeted twixt now and then, so it’s good to see there are still places where thay can still be found doing what lapwing should be doing!

One of the ‘must see‘ natural events in the UK occurs in the winter when hundreds of thousands of ducks, waders and, in particular, geese spend the season on the mudflats of the Wash. The Wash is a huge bay on the east coast of England into which the rivers Witham, Welland, Nene and Great Ouse all drain into the North Sea.

When the tide recedes, like Morecambe Bay in the previous post, enormous areas of mudflats are exposed which provide sustenance and a roost site for colossal numbers of birds. Every morning at dawn thousands of geese take flight to head inland to feed, and the geese are what everyone goes there to see.

I arrived at the coast at Snettisham on the north Norfolk coast around 6am when it was just starting to get light. Already sizable flocks of geese were in the air and I was concerned that I’d missed most of them. But then as the sun rose higher gargantuan flocks started to pass overhead and it was a truly incredible sight!

I don’t know how many thousands of geese were there but at the end of the day I went back to the same place to see them return. It was getting dark and all was still, so, as in the morning, I thought I’d missed them. And then they appeared, quite suddenly in their tens of thousands. I tried to estimate the numbers by counting small numbers of each wave and multiplying up, and I estimated there were between 30-40,000 birds returning.

Skeins within skeins, I like this formation

And if you’ve ever spent any time near geese you’ll know that they’re not afraid to announce their presence, so the other thing that I hadn’t expected, but maybe I should have done, was the noise. It was a magnificent cacophony! And not just the squawking, but the sound of them flying when they came over lower to the ground.

These birds breed in the summer up in the Arctic, in Greenland, Iceland and Spitsbergen and then head south to the relatively balmy conditions of the UK coast in winter (!).

Another skein of pink footed geese passing low overhead

It’s unknown why geese fly in skeins, but it’s thought to provide an aerodynamic advantage to the ones behind as they slipstream in turbulent air generated by the bird in front. Which makes me wonder if they constantly switch the pacemaker or if the biggest and strongest bird is always the one at the front.

I estimated there were around 500 birds in this huge flock, but even that was a tiny proportion of the total

To see this meant getting up and out at 4am which is never my favourite thing to do, and it was ferociously cold, but it was worth it to see such a unique spectacle. And as the sun rose and it got lighter, it soon became apparent that the geese weren’t the only seabirds in the area:

A shelduck (Tadorna tadorna, Dansk: gravand) on final approach past a lone dunlin in the foreground

Small flocks of shelduck and dunlin were mingling and feeding close in to the shore

The Wash is now not the only significant area of coastal mudflat in East Anglia. In order to attempt to mitigate some of the anticipated ravages of climate change, flood defences protecting areas of farmland on the coast further south in Essex have been deliberately breached. This has allowed the land to be reclaimed by the sea and to regenerate the tidal mudflats that were there before humans originally interfered. The new habitat was created with the millions of tons of earth removed the ground under London in order to build the Crossrail tube train tunnels. And as soon as this happened the wildlife started to recolonise, and even though it is still fairly barren in comparison to established habitat, I hope that in the near future it will also provide refuge to hundreds of thousands more birds, and lots of other wildlife too.

Dunlin (Calidris alpina, Dansk: almindelig ryle)

But more of dunlin in the next post, and plenty more species of sea birds both at Snettisham and after that at the RSPB coastal reserve at Titchwell.

I’ve just got back from a walk around Milton Country Park, on the northern edge of Cambridge, which was enjoyable and cold in equal measure. Of which more subsequently. And now I’m sitting watching our resident robin chase a dunnock around a bush in my back garden whilst pondering the diversity of birdlife in our area.

Avian diversity in East Anglia was the subject of a slideshow I saw last week organised by the local Cambridge RSPB group entitled ‘Birds of East Anglia’. The speaker was Bill Baston who is a highly accomplished bird photographer living in Suffolk, and has probably photographed nearly all the birds we see in this region. Bill has a very good website, www.billbaston.com, where he’s posted many excellent images from his travels to many parts of the world. For the photographers amongst you he uses Canon hardware with a 500mm telephoto lens.

East Anglia is an excellent place to see birds due to it’s proximity to mainland Europe and the North Sea. Many rare and sometimes exotic visitors can arrive here by mistake or due to being blown off course whilst heading south on the winter migration. The European bee-eater (Merops apiaster), the northern subspecies of long tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus caudatus) which is immediately distinguishable from our regular British long tailed tit (A. c. rosaceus) by its completely white head, and the unmistakeable hoopoe (Upupa epops) can all occasionally be seen by the vigilant spotter.

Aswell as such visiting rarities it’s usually not necessary to travel too far to see our normal indigenous species, amongst which I include regular migrants. There is a large diversity of habitat in East Anglia, from the tidal mudflats of The Wash in the north of the region, famous for it’s enormous flocks of overwintering waders and geese, the Brecks on the Norfolk/Suffolk border where nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus – the generic name from the Latin for ‘goatsucker’ as a result of the archaic, and mistaken, notion they suck milk from goats!) can be seen and heard ‘churring‘ on summer evenings, to the Blackwater estuary in Essex at the southern end of East Anglia which is also a great place to see large numbers of waders and other sea birds. In between these extremities lie the Norfolk Broads, the UK’s largest protected wetland and National Park, Wicken Fen near Ely and Grafham Water near Huntingdon.

This is a small sample of all of the lovely places to see wildlife in this region. But if you don’t find yourself anywhere near these, parks, gardens, hedgerows and fields are all worth a glance – you never know what you might find.